The White House took a significant step on Wednesday by denying access to President Donald Trump’s inaugural cabinet meeting to journalists from Reuters and other news organizations, in accordance with its novel media coverage policy.
Most notably, an Associated Press photographer and three reporters from Reuters, HuffPost, and Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper, were not given access. At the same time, ABC and Newsmax TV crews and correspondents from Axios, The Blaze, Bloomberg News, and NPR were permitted to cover the event.
The action came a day after the Trump administration announced that it would decide which media organizations could cover the president in smaller settings like the Oval Office. The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has traditionally controlled the rotation of the presidential press pool, a system Reuters has been a part of for decades.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that while traditional media outlets would still enjoy day-to-day access to the president, the administration will be altering participation in smaller groups. The WHCA pool system has long allowed a select number of television, radio, wire, print, and photojournalists to cover events and share their reporting with a larger group.
In response to the policy shift, the three wire services—AP, Bloomberg, and Reuters—issued a joint statement expressing their commitment to delivering accurate and timely news of the presidency to a diverse audience around the globe. They referred to the essential role of a free press in a democracy and that public access to government news is essential.
HuffPost condemned the White House action as a violation of First Amendment freedom of the press. Der Tagesspiegel has yet to comment on the episode.
In addition, the WHCA expressed its unhappiness with the new policy through an official statement. This follows an earlier move by the Trump administration to ban the Associated Press from the press pool due to its refusal to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” a preferred name for the president.
Leavitt stated the major cable and broadcast networks would retain their rotating seats in the press pool, and streaming organizations would be added to the rotation. Print journalists and radio correspondents would continue to rotate, and new publications and hosts would also be added.
